Theatre

‘Le Mariage’ is rooted in documentary truth, but French playwright David Lescot has forged from the facts something implausible. The French have apparently taken to sheltering immigrants in their homes to defend them against President Sarkozy’s deportation drive. In Lescot’s oblique two-hander, a well-heeled woman has wed an Arab immigrant to secure his citizenship. At the end of their first year of marriage, its authenticity will be investigated by the state. So the couple arrange to meet one day per month throughout that year, to learn about one another in 12 bite-sized modules: Eating, Bodies, Memories, etc.

It’s a forced premise, which threatens to impose a lumbering structure on the 80-minute play. (The best moment is when four meetings pass in the blink of an eye because the man hasn’t shown up). It also slightly alienated me from the characters, because I couldn’t believe they’d devised such a daft plan. Mind you, Michael Gieleta’s cool production (costumes by couturier Agnes B) keeps those characters as impersonal as their ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ designations suggest. There’s little humour, and the whole enterprise has a stilted, play-in-translation quality, not helped by lumpen dialogue: ‘My hope kills me. I am lost.’

That’s a shame, because there’s dramatic potential in a play about two strangers forced to be intimate (as ‘Green Card’ with Gerard Depardieu so lavishly proved). Here, the situation devolves into Genet-style psycho-sexual roleplay, with Woman on all-fours sniffing Man’s feet, and power changing hands between the pair. Lescot seems to be writing (à la Wallace Shawn’s ‘The Fever’) about liberal conscience and the real world’s resistance to doing its bidding. But, here at least, his play proves similarly uncooperative.